Opinions

News

Sports

Business

Entertainment

GhanaWeb TV

Africa

Country

Ghana still lives in the poverty threshold HIPC or no HIPC

Ken Ofori Atta Worried Finance Minister, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 Source: Bright Philip Donkor, Contributor

But unfortunately, we live in a society where governments use complex solutions to simple problems and vice versa. It's no surprise that, minor problems have now become incurable syndromes militating against our economic freedom and prosperity.

In economics, we don't eat patriotism and economic freedom entails economic competition/Marketocracy but should be private sector centered.

Although our economic parameters speak of positive signs of improvement in the form of the comparatively stable strength of the cedi, lower inflation rate, reduced interest rate, etc., the private sector is even yet to take advantage of these for the accelerated economic growth that will reflect in the pockets of the average Ghanaian.

Prices on the markets and the ease of doing business form another devil to deal with.

Hence, devoid of all-partisan inclinations and parochial interests, we as citizens of this country must play our individual and collective parts at this crucial moment of our nation's development to pull the shackles of economic woes of our nation. Wasting precious time on whether we have gone HIPC or not, whether we are out of HIPC is not the issue now.

Ghana's debt to GDP is 68% and project to hit 76.7% by December 2020, having spiked 44% from 2016 to 58.3% in 2017 to 59.1% in 2018, 62.8% in 2019, and currently 68% in July 2020. This means that at our the current level of GDP, only 32% indeed belongs to Ghana, which will be used to feed over 30 million people.

You can divide 32% of our current GDP by 30 million population and see if Ghanaians are not the poorest people on earth.

It's not about IMF coming to say or didn't say it, neither it is about Mahama said what or not, for the future is too dark for Ghanaians. Yet, we are not told what we used the money for. We have some people coming here to spur trash in the name of politics.

Every patriotic Ghanaian should be concerned about the deteriorating debt situation in Ghana particularly when we can't point to what we use the borrowed money for. We still live in the poverty threshold and we must get rid of it. This isn't the time for some politicians and other social commentators to use our poverty to score political points. Ghana has been poor and we are still poor.

Columnist: Bright Philip Donkor, Contributor